down in his interest
to split the Liberal vote.

I found the doctor one night addressing a mere handful of people in a
vast building which would have accommodated two or three hundred for
every unit he had before him. That was the first occasion in my life on
which I wore a dress suit; and amidst the unwashed, coally-flannelled
handful, I daresay that my expanse of shirt front, and the flower in my
buttonhole, made me conspicuous. I was a red-hot Liberal in those days,
for no better reason, probably, than that my father held that form of
creed, and I was quite persuaded that Kenealy was a paid impostor. So
when, in that raucous voice of his, he said, "I love the working man,"
I answered from below with a cry of "Bunkum, doctor, bunkum." The doctor
paused and looked at me, but said nothing at the moment By and by he
flowed on: "When I go to the poll with ten thousand of the working men
of this constituency behind me," and I chimed in with a cry of "When,
doctor, when?" This time the orator fixed my flint, as the Americans
used to say. He surveyed me from top to toe, and he said quietly, and in
a tone of deep commiseration: "I pity that drunken blackguard." My first
impulse was to spring upon the platform, and to throw the speaker from
it; but it was so obvious that I could not clear myself of the imputation
cast upon me in that way that I surrendered the idea in the very instant
in which it occurred to me. I searched in my own mind for a retort,
but I searched in vain; and I spent a good part of that night in the
invention of scorching phrases. But the exercise afforded me no relief,
and on the following day I sat down and wrote my first newspaper
article. We had in our new-made borough, in those days, one ineffective,
inoffensive little weekly journal called the _Wednesbury Advertiser_,
and I posted my article to the editor, who, as much to my surprise as
my delight, printed it in all the glory of leaded type. I believe I was
under the impression that it would kill Kenealy; but, as all the world
knows, the poor man survived for years, and died from wholly different
causes. That was the determining incident in my career, and for months
afterwards I wrote the _Advertisers_ leaders without any sort of
agreement, and without receipt or expectation of any kind of pay. It is
not because I imagine my work to have been exceptionally brilliant that
I am disposed to think that I must have seemed a sort of heaven-sent
blessing to